A Lurker's History of Paradox and the Paradox Community *
by Stacy Rowley
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The Early DOS Days: the People (the Product Add-ins)
Third party products appeared. Two of the first were a data dictionary product called Paralex
from Alan Zenreich and a group of utilities named Desktop for Paradox 3.0 from Dan Ehrmann of Kallista.
There was a need for a useful editor for writing PAL, and early on two very good ones came to market. Jim Kocis at the Burgiss Group developed Playright Pro (basic scripts are "played") and Bill Todd and Dan Ehrmann at Kallista brought out PAL-Edit, based on Multi-Edit with macros by Todd and help by Ehrmann. These had good Paradox help capabilities and useful macros that facilitated writing, compiling, and testing.
Alan Zenreich, Jim Kocis, and Andy Appell developed WaitPlus Pro, an integrated set of PAL procedures to perform WAIT RECORD logic in a very thorough and productive way. It greatly expanded on the earlier Data Entry Toolkit.
A need to handle memo fields brought about KMemo from Kallista and TxtView from Burgiss Group. Luke Chung of FMS produced several products, including ParaView to document forms and reports and ParaStat for statistics.
Joe Fung of Farpoint Systems developed ScriptView as a documentation and debugging aid for PAL scripts. Adapta Software produced AdaptAccounts, an accounting product that continued through to Paradox for Windows.
Ensemble Corporation developed Command Center, which produced 3-D effects, in DOS mind you, for buttons, fields on forms, and menus. This creativity from Tony Goodman helped prepare us for Window days. By 1991, there were some thirty companies offering over sixty add-ins!
From very early on, LAPALS published a useful newsletter that was available by subscription to non-members. In February 1991, Mitch Koulouris created a publishing business called the Informant Communications Group, which moved the Sacramento Paradox SIG publication to an international level as the Paradox Informant. One of the writers, Cary Jensen, produced many, many educational articles. Later on, Jensen expanded to a book for Paradox Windows.
A monumental effort by Alan Zenreich and Jim Kocis produced the book Paradox Programmer's Guide: PAL by Example, which thoroughly documented PAL programming and, with its examples, helped produce some standardization in coding.
Celeste Robinson, a former Borland employee, authored a popular book, The Best Book of Paradox 3, followed by a later book on Paradox 4.0. Greg Salcedo and Martin Rudy produced Paradox 3.5 Power Programming Techniques. Stacy Rowley wrote a short book, Rowley's Paradox Notes, which elaborated on gleanings from BORDB. Jane Richter (a.k.a. Lady Jane) led Borland's training. Kevin Smith of Soft Byte, an outstanding teacher, toured the country teaching various Paradox seminars.
Next:
The Early DOS Days: the Paradox Conferences
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